The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2010 Conference and Expo opened today to well over 1600 attendees. The conference registration grew over 30% from last year, and the number of Expo exhibitors is up by over 50%. Sixteen companies have announced or launched new products at this year’s show.
The New Face of Learning
The theme of the conference is “The New Face of Learning.” In his welcoming comments, Brent Schlenker, the DevLearn Program Director and Emerging Technologies Analyst, asked, “What is the new face of learning?” The answer is that it is you – and your network of learning colleagues. Each of us is connected to a much larger community now through new mobile devices and online social technology. The new face isn’t just each of us individually, it is the embodiment of everyone each of us knows. The new face of learning is why all the attendees are here, and it will be their experience for the next three days.
The DevLearn experience
The experience of DevLearn began on Monday of this week for over 300 conference participants who also registered for The eLearning Guild Academy. These certificate programs provided comprehensive coverage of topics ranging from creating learning strategies to video production to the design of learning games to the details of advanced skills with authoring tools.
A key item to support a great experience at DevLearn is the ATIV app especially created for the conference, and available for the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry devices. This app provides updated information about sessions, events, and speakers, in a convenient portable format.
This year’s DevLearn includes and expands upon popular features from previous years. Each day begins with Breakfast Bytes, small discussion groups where colleagues share their experiences, best practices, insights, and tips. Social networks (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) are an important way to share what participants are seeing and doing, in real time. (For readers who are not here, on Twitter follow @devlearn and the #dl10 hash tag.)
Hallway stages feature the Mobile Learning Jam, the Social Learning Camp, Learning Media Studio, and the Serious Games Zone. On these stages, experts and enthusiasts present ideas, strategies, and tools and respond to questions from attendees. Master Classes are available on two stages where participants can see concrete demonstrations of tools, technologies, and services offered by the exhibitors in the Expo.
Two online games round out the ongoing features – and not only do you not need to be present to win, you don’t even need to be present to play! The Alternate Reality Game “Dr. Strangelove’s Learning Laboratory” shows you how to convince your organization of the value of the latest ideas, strategies, and technologies for learning. The Backchatter game is a fun activity played in rounds in which participants try to guess the terms that will be tweeted most often.
Opening keynote: John Seely Brown
John Seely Brown is Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California, although this is only the latest entry in his 50-page CV. He applied the theme of his latest book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motionto the challenges of learning in the twenty-first century. He showed how the industrial age goal of achieving scalable efficiency is no longer appropriate, for companies or for learning. In the past, the model of education and training was based on a predictable curriculum, standards-based and authority focused.
The game has changed, due to continual exponential advances in technology. There is no stability in sight, and change is never-ending. The half-life of skills is constantly shrinking, and the predictability of future needs is never-ending. The big shift is from Push to Pull.
The key Brown suggests to dealing with these changes is to learn how to embrace change, not fear it. He says that we need to rethink how we actually learn – especially about tacit learning, the way we learn without even thinking about it. This will require creating a resilient mindset: the ability to change, adapt, reconceptualize, and engage in deep listen with humility.
He offered examples of extreme cases of amazing learning through social media, such as The Grommets, a team of surfers in Maui, and the way in which players in the game World of Warcraft develop their performance through in-dwelling and the use of dashboards. The lesson is to look at the social life around the edge of the game or the activity, not the game or activity itself. The edge is often referred to as the “knowledge economy,” where participants create knowledge through exchange.
The days ahead in DevLearn
We will continue to summarize highlights of Thursday and Friday of the DevLearn 2010 Conference and Expo. Tomorrow will culminate in the always-popular DemoFest, where dozens of practitioners show their work and discuss how they created it. Friday ends the conference with a tremendous panel on new perspectives in learning.
